I thought race was a social construct? But this story claims that race is real and your life might depend on racial compatibility. <\/p>\n
Los Angeles Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n Matthew Medina\u2019s doctors diagnosed him with a rare blood disease a few months ago and told him he would probably die without a bone marrow transplant.<\/p>\n With that prognosis came another: The 40-year-old Los Angeles police officer had a less than 50% chance of finding a donor because he is not white.<\/p>\n Most successful matches for bone marrow transplants involve a donor and patient of the same ethnicity. But the majority of the 25 million registered donors nationwide are white, and Medina is Filipino. So far, no match has been found.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re basically looking for a genetic twin,\u201d said Athena Mari Asklipiadis, who runs Mixed Marrow, an L.A.-based organization that is trying to increase diversity in the bone marrow donor registry. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we have more of a chance we would get a disease, or that we\u2019re harder to match, it\u2019s just that there\u2019s not representation in the national registry.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a familiar problem for any nonwhite person who has needed a bone marrow transplant.<\/p>\n A white American of European descent has a 75% chance of finding a perfect match in the national donor registry, compared with a 40% chance for Filipinos. Few Filipinos in the U.S. have signed up as potential donors, and there is no registry in the Philippines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wonder why Filipinos are not signing up to donate blood marrow? I wonder why whites donate in large numbers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I thought race was a social construct? But this story claims that race is real and your life might depend on racial compatibility. Los Angeles Times: Matthew Medina\u2019s doctors diagnosed him with a rare blood disease a few months ago … Continue reading